Peculiar Features of High-Rise Buildings Design in the USA

The article prepared by INFORCEPROJECT company’s Chief Design Engineer and partner Dmitry Zelenov deals with the design process management and regulations, as well as peculiarities of structural solutions for high-rise buildings and calculations for high-rise structures in the USA. Thanks to the work experience acquired in Chicago, when the author of the article had a period of training in Halvorson and Partners (WSP business branch) as a part of the international cooperation and experience exchange program practiced in the company, he was engaged in the design of some local and global projects. He had an opportunity to study and compare regulations and technologies applied in Russia and the United States of America. The article will be interesting to Russian specialists who work on collaborative projects in high-rise construction. 

Historical foundations for high-rise design in the USA were laid in Chicago with its favorable conditions for the mass construction of multi-storeyed buildings developed following the great fire of 1871. At the beginning of the next century, the high-rise construction boom also overtook New York. With the skyscrapers competing with each other in their heights, the XX century was marked with the construction of such significant for those times towers as Empire State Building (New York, 1931, height – 381 m, 449 m with the antenna) and Sears Tower (Chicago, 1974, height – 442 m, 527 m with the antenna). 

Through all this time city-planning legislation, design regulations, architectural and design solutions as well as construction technologies have been improving. Customers and architects set new tasks for engineers that were solved successfully by them. Acquired knowledge and skills allowed American design engineers to gain leading positions in high-rise design and to establish such famous companies as Skidmore, Owings & Merrill (SOM), Arup, AECOM, WSP Parsons Brinckerhoff, Tornton Tomasetti that focus on the development of tall building projects. 

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Materials provided by INFORCEPROJECT, LLC Text by Dmitry Zelenov